darkknight109 posted...Lokarin posted...
darkknight109 posted...
"Kore wa pan da" and "Kore wa pan desu"
Weird...
I thought the first one is "This is bread" and the second one is "Is this bread?"
Nope - in Japanese, questions are marked by the particle "ka". For "Is this bread?" you would just add "ka" to the end of either quote, i.e. "Kore wa pan da ka?" (informal) or "Kore wa pan desu ka?" (formal).
Actually, in informal speech, you mark a question either by adding the explanatory "no" or, more frequently, by just using a rising inflection without any additions. You can add "ka" in informal Japanese to indicate a question, but it's mostly used for sarcasm or to sound like a smartass.
As for English, it obviously seems easy for most people here - most of us are Western Europeans, and English is omnipresent, particularly on the internet. But if you really look at it, English orthography is bat-shit crazy and nowhere near sufficient to represent its complex phonology, English grammar is only simple on the surface and once you get into truly idiomatic speech, all bets are off.
Spanish, for example, is a much easier language to learn than English - actually, all the Romance languages are relatively logical. (Though the lack of a grammatical gender in English is just wonderful - in my native German, we even disagree on the correct gender of certain nouns on a region-by-region basis; "butter", for example, is feminine in Standard German, but masculine in many southern regions like my native Bavaria)
Still, even with all the bullshit baggage, English is much easier than all the Slavic and Semitic languages. Asian languages are kind of a mixed bag - Chinese, for example, actually has relatively simple grammar, but all tonal languages are bullshit simply by dint of being tonal.
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